The Wall

I sit in front of the narrow way
it stretches
restricted
And all I see in front of me is a wall
Soul-less, soul-sucking, inviting despair
Composed of bricks of inadequacies and false adequacies
Fears and former dreams.
It is high, but not so high
A leap, a bound
I'd clear it and be on my way --
not so bad once the wall was passed
('til I reached the next) --
had I the strength.
Had I.
And that leap-able but unsurpassable height sits mocking me,
Reminding me I could be a saint if I could choose it.
And that one "if" echoes with the promise of an eternal nothing:
comfortable, safe, alone.
Heaven's a decision I'm not strong enough to make.
"You built me," the barrier mocks.
"I became more insurpassable with each moment you could not surpass yourself."
A necessary silence or a necessary smile that lay lingering in the air
unfulfilled.
Carpe Diem, seize the day;
What fool would defer, defer, then be no more?
The despairing choice of multitudes suddenly becomes clear.
My barrier built in a life of relative ease.
I cannot jump it,
not for my sake.
The prize mocks by its proximity:
"You could, if..."
The narrow way is simpler when it's vast
confusing
labyrinthine.
More hopeful when The Decision's deferred
To somewhere, somehow, down the line.
To if I turn the corners right.
Surely a single jump is not the only route?
Pushing, climbing, dismantling brick by brick.
But then I look to the side, and see Him.
Him on the cross with his arms stretched wide
In the widest embrace man has ever known
Wide enough to bridge the gap between creator and created
The eternal and the temporally bound
Wide enough for me and my wall besides,
And the width of his arms is the width of the narrow way.
I see how blind I've been
blind, blind, deliberately blind.
I broaden my gaze to match his, and I see the way
Not over, through, bounding, scraping
But around.
Slowly, sheepish, I peer, I look up.
I look around my wall and there He is
Has been
Eternally has been,
Hanging there as if to say "I have all eternity to wait for you."
His wounds more eloquent than any man can intertwine.
Inscribed in each of them are two simple, fatal words:
"I thirst."
Fatal because I could have chosen loneliness for myself, but not for Him.
Fatal for my faults, my fears, my former dreams,
Fatal for the wall which dissipates like so much smoke
Because it does not, cannot matter when He is there.
It does not, cannot span the chasm of his thirst,
I cannot cover it over, it yawns:
gaping, mawing, bleeding since the dawn of time.
Nowhere to run from wounds so vast I am engulfed.
"Come down. Come down because I will not come
Yet cannot leave you there."
Churlish, childish, I command:
Afraid because he found the point on which I cannot yield.
He does not answer, only hangs, hangs and loves,
And by His hanging writes my sentence,
the just penalty for every "No" I wish to fling against the promise of eternal joy:
"I hang, have hung, will hang, am eternally hung
For you
And I will not come down."
Precisely because I cannot, am naught and fulfill naught:
I must.
If He could be satisfied I'd look to stronger types.
Defer until He came down
To leave me for a better love.
But as He is helpless, hopeless,
Hopelessly in love,
I cannot leave Him there.
He nags me, loves me, baits me with His wounds
And sings,
Sings my name sweetly from the cross.
Each wound a note in an eternally written symphony.
I could be won with no earthly roses, but He bleeds me a garden,
An offer I cannot refuse:
"Come, come and bring your wall.
I'll make it mine,
If you but come.
Come, and follow me."

The Visitation

The Second Joyful Mystery: The Visitation

The Fruit of the Mystery: Ministry by allowing Elizabeth her joy

A year ago I wrote a post on the Magnificat. One of the parting points of the piece, and the "thesis" of the post, was the following:

Elizabeth's greeting is Mary centric. It is all about her greeting, her voice, her womb, and her response to God. Mary does not condemn this, but she redirects it. She changes all of the you to He. It is not about what she has done for God, it is about what God has done for her, and for everyone else.

"...the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name."

[...] while proclamation is more active, magnification is a passive thing. When a magnifying glass is placed in front of something else, it cannot help but to magnify it.

In my last post, on the Annunciation, I focused on what exactly the Almighty did for Mary: namely, leveling the playing field for her from the start so she had the freedom to choose Him. This is a leveling He does vocationally for each of us; although (because less is asked) less is given to us than to Mary.

Mary, the perfected recreation of who we were meant to be, blazed a trail for us to follow when she walked her path. If we are to take the Joyful Mysteries as an encapsulation for us of what our own vocational journey should look like, after this moment of super-abundant grace comes the next scene, the Visitation, where others recognize something extraordinary in us. When your life has just been changed and re-shaped by an unmerited gift, personal praise of this nature can be hard to stomach.

But Mary doesn't just redirect the praise. She allows Elizabeth her joy. This, more than any physical acts of service she did while she was there, was her primary act of service to her cousin.

Mary was not given her vocation for herself, but for the world. After the acceptance of the gift, she goes out. Out to the hill country of Judea, out on a long and arduous journey, out to minister. Our vocation, if it is from God, should not merely deepen our interior life; it broadens our heart outwards to include others, to allow us to embrace the world.

Sometimes when we embrace the world it responds coldly; it does not understand. Other times when we embrace the world it understands completely. It rejoices because we have given it hope. Elizabeth said to Mary:

Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

Elizabeth was in a unique position to understand Mary since she herself was the beneficiary of a miraculous act.  Yet Mary also came to help Elizabeth better understand her own vocation. Mary's arrival happens in a critical period in Elizabeth's life: after she was the recipient of a miracle but before her husband's lips were unsealed to explain to her the larger significance. Up until the Visitation, Elizabeth saw the gift of her unexpected pregnancy as something given to her by the Lord "to take away my reproach among men." (Luke 1:25) Given that she saw John the Baptist as a personal gift to herself, it would not be surprising for Elizabeth to initially see Mary's pregnancy in the same way. After all, in those times, fertility was tightly linked in social and religious perception to divine favor. Yet she said "Blessed are you among women" as a direct out-flow of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. She saw Mary and her cooperation with the Divine Will as good in and of themselves because, by the very act of her yes, even before accomplishing anything wonderful in the world, Mary opened Elizabeth's eyes to the realm of what was possible with God's grace.

The best way that Mary can help Elizabeth correct her perception of her pregnancy and understand that her vocation is a gift not to herself but to the world is to let Elizabeth be the first beneficiary of the manifold gifts that Mary's own vocation will give to the world -- to be the first of the children of Israel to feel hope at the coming of Christ  ("Why is this granted me..."). Hope that He would make all things new and accomplish something beautiful in us.

That is the kind of witness to beauty that we with our vocations are called to give. This witness does not allow us to hide in humility, but sometimes it is far more humble to simply shine.

The Annunciation

The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation

Fruit of the Mystery: "Yes" to the unknown

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, San Marco Monastery, Florence

I've already explained here why Fra Angelico is my favorite artist, so I won't dwell on that; I'll merely say that this is my favorite depiction of the Annunciation. The specifics of its theology will probably come up over the course of the post; for now it speaks for itself.

As stated here this series of meditations on the rosary is set in the context of a vocational journey. And so let us begin.

God comes into our lives and announces to us that great plan that he has for us. At times he does this directly, and at times through intermediaries -- just as the angel Gabriel was an intermediary to Mary. At times the vocational call is something we have known for all of our lives; at times it is a total surprise -- something we have never imagined. The Virgin Mary's call certainly falls in the latter category. Though  the length of time between when one hears the call and when it comes to fruition can vary greatly, one thing is constant: it is always something for which God has been preparing us for all of our lives -- just as he prepared the Virgin Mary by her Immaculate Conception.

It is crucial to make a distinction here. Although God has been preparing us for this moment for all of our lives, this is not Calvinistic predestination. We still have the freedom to reject it -- although this would be a rejection and a fracture of our own being (this idea is expressed very well in And You Are Christ's by Fr. Thomas Dubay). Mary, just like us, would have been capable of rejecting the invitation to be Christ's mother had she wanted to do so; in the Immaculate Conception God merely gave her the enormous grace necessary to be able to understand and accept His call.

There are several reasons why this is so interesting to me. The first is that something about the combination of the Immaculate Conception and Annunciation has always (ironically) struck me as a bit too Calvinistic to sit right -- especially when you have hymn verses like "predestined for Christ by eternal decree."1 Mary, however, is not predestined in the traditional Calvinistic fate-robot sense of the word. To see why, we have to look at the nature of concupiscence.

Concupiscence, as it turns out, is a tragically misunderstood word. Most dictionaries, in a form of demented synecdoche, equate a facet of it -- sexual desire -- with the whole thing; however concupiscence is much more than simply a synonym for libido. According to CCC 405:

[O]riginal sin [...] is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called "concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

Our own concupiscence makes it hard for us to follow God's will in our lives. An absence of concupiscence doesn't mean we are obligated to do good, merely that the playing field is level instead of tilted. With concupiscence, the devil already has a foothold in our hearts before the battle even starts. We're already inclined to listen to him. For Mary to have been born with concupiscence would have been the ultimate lottery for him. If you have to fight a battle just to not snooze the alarm in the morning, just think of the war he must have waged against the woman "destined" to crush his head with her heel. No concupiscence doesn't mean no temptation -- just look at Eve -- it just means the slate is clean; there's no "acquired taste" for sin.

God gives us this grace as well -- although it is not necessary for him to totally remove our concupiscence.  Without this grace we would be utterly incapable of accepting the magnificent gift he offers us; it would seem to us like a punishment instead of a gift. It is critically important that we see Mary's fiat in this same light -- if she becomes roped into Divine Motherhood by her pre-conception acceptance of unsolicited gifts and the accompanying obligations, one of the most profoundly beautiful aspects of salvation history goes stale. Just like with the dual-authorship of the Bible, God has the divine condescension, the profound humility to let humans share the credit for the mystery of his grace working in our world.

This is why Mary is the New Eve, and why her "Yes" is so beautiful. She, like us, had the power to say "No." She, like us, was given the grace to have the freedom to say "Yes."

There are many times in our vocational journey when we are asked to say "Yes." Most of them are mundane and have no angels or moments of Divine Revelation, they are nothing more than painful perseverance on a path we have already begun to trod. But here, in the Annunciation, we meditate on the grace Mary received to make that first painful, beautiful fiat. There would be other, more meaningful surrenders later (with Simeon at the presentation, in the crowd as the mob yelled "Crucify him!", at the foot of the Cross), where she knew just how much was asked, and still surrendered all.

The Annunciation is a jump into an abyss. It is a "Yes" to an unknown: an act of love, an act of trust, an act of grace.
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1 Thankfully for my spiritual life I generally tend more towards the "I'm too stupid to understand what's actually going on" than the "let's nail my objections to the Church door" approach; as an end result I developed a voracious appetite for reading apologetics materials in high-school.